The development of hosted business applications composed of web services can be expensive and time consuming. An Internet-hosted business application refers to an Internet accessible application (via the World Wide Web) for performing business functions. The business application can be “assembled” using web services, which are software components that are accessible over the Internet using XML standards. Examples of hosted business applications composed of web services that perform business functions and are accessible by the public include tracking services provided by express couriers, airline websites through which flight information and reservation services are available, and utilities such as Babelfish by AltaVista for performing language translation services. These examples are all publicly available. However, enterprise solutions for corporate intranets are much more complex and difficult to develop.
Factors that contribute to the expense and development difficulty include: the level of experience of the developers; repetition of similar or related work performed on previous projects; access to or development of unique applications created to help different third-party applications work together; and whether there is access to a library of resources for creating such environments.
Conventionally, hosted business applications composed of web services are created at a central location where many if not all of the application developers and testers work. If this development center is located in a region where such developers and software designers are in high demand or such services are provided at premium costs, then the cost to produce such an environment may be considerable. In addition, even if such a development team worked diligently, there is likely to be times when little or no development or testing is being completed, e.g., 12 AM to 6 AM.
Testing a hosted web services-based business application before its launch comprises a substantial portion of the development costs. One known solution for reducing testing costs is to perform the testing portion of the development in a geographic region or foreign country where labor costs for testers is not as expensive as in the country in which the primary development occurs. However, this requires that developers from the country in which development occurs travel to the country in which testing will occur, and setup and configure the appropriate hosted web services testing environment on computers at the testing location. At a minimum, the actual computers on which the system is being developed are shipped to the testing location, which still incurs shipping and setup costs.
Furthermore, additional expenses may be incurred in the conventional environment development described above due to the fact that the environments are created in isolation, and because other potential long-term partners are not brought into the project until near the end of development or until after development is completed. If an Internet Hosting service provider (HSP) is not brought into the project until the application development project nears completion, then the application may not have been optimized for or to take advantage of unique network characteristics and services of the selected HSP, and the HSP generally would not have as deep an understanding of the environment as if it had been involved with the development process from the beginning.
There presently is no system through which geographically distributed developers can create hosted business applications composed of web services, nor is there a system through which development can occur in one location, and testing can occur in a second location without incurring shipping costs or performing extensive software setup and installation at the second location. Thus, it would be an advancement in the art to provide an Internet-accessible application development environment through which developers and testers from various locations can perform hosted business application system development and testing without being required to travel to a specific development location.